Politics & Power Quote by Marco Rubio

Rubio’s line is a weaponized sentiment that flatters the audience by treating their frustration as proof of superior clarity. “Never has” is the tell: it’s not a claim meant to be audited so much as a permission slip to feel historically wronged. The superlative turns normal democratic disappointment into an emergency, collapsing decades of policy disputes, cultural churn, and institutional mistrust into one clean villain: a smug “political class” and the “mainstream media” that supposedly launders its narrative.

The pairing matters. He’s not only attacking politicians; he’s attacking the referees. By bundling elected officials with journalists, Rubio implies a closed loop of elites who talk to each other, not to voters. That frame does two jobs at once: it delegitimizes criticism (it’s just “the media” protecting “the class”) and recasts his own side as the only channel through which “the American people” can be heard. It’s populism with a lawyer’s neatness, using abstraction to avoid specifics. Who exactly is out of touch, and about what? Leaving it vague lets any listener fill in their own grievance: wages, borders, crime, religion, cultural status.

The context is a Republican Party reshaped by anti-establishment energy, where distrust of institutions is not a byproduct but a strategy. Rubio, himself a long-serving senator, navigates that tension by speaking as if he’s outside the club while standing squarely inside it. The subtext: if you feel ignored, it’s not complexity or trade-offs; it’s contempt.